Thursday, December 12, 2013

Exercise as Potent Medicine

The results...underscore how infrequently exercise is considered or
studied as a medical intervention, Dr. Ioannidis said. “Only 5 percent”
of the available and relevant experiments in his new analysis involved
exercise.

"They ended up with data covering 305 past experiments that,
collectively, involved almost 340,000 participants, which is an
impressive total. But most of the volunteers had received drugs. Only 57
of the experiments, involving 14,716 volunteers, had examined the
impact of exercise as a treatment. Still, the numbers were large enough that Mr. Naci and Dr. Ioannidis
could create an elaborate network of cross-references, comparing the
outcomes when people received certain drugs, followed exercise regimens
or, occasionally, both. The exercise routines, typically part of
rehabilitation programs, usually involved walking or other aerobic
routines but sometimes consisted of weight training or other exercises. The researchers compared mortality risks for people following any of the treatment options.

The results consistently showed that drugs and exercise produced
almost exactly the same results. People with heart disease, for
instance, who exercised but did not use commonly prescribed medications,
including statins, angiotensin-converting-enzyme inhibitors or
antiplatelet drugs, had the same risk of dying from — or surviving —
heart disease as patients taking those drugs. Similarly, people with
diabetes who exercised had the same relative risk of dying from the
condition as those taking the most commonly prescribed drugs. Or as the
researchers wrote in statistics-speak, “When compared head to head in
network meta-analyses, all interventions were not different beyond
chance.” On the other hand, people who once had suffered a stroke had
significantly less risk of dying from that condition if they exercised
than if they used medications — although the study authors note that
stroke patients who can exercise may have been unusually healthy to
start with."http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/11/exercise-as-potent-medicine/?src=me&ref=general&_r=0